The narrative competence of pre-school children with a migrant background

Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject German Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Graz (Sprachwissenschaft), course: Sprache und Gesellschaft, language: English, abstract: The narrative competence of pre-school children marks the transition from orat to literate language productions so that they are an indicator for the pre-literate language skills which are indispensable for educational success in the Western-European countries. The study of Schwabl (2015) which is presented here investigates migrant childrens narrative competence to find out which language structures are the most problematic. The overarching questions of this paper are, what are the main linguistic problems of these bilingual and migrant pre-school children, which are the linguistic structures they lack regarding their pre-literate language skills and how can we develop methods to evaluate these specific skills to support their language progression. No age-based development can be noted due to the high individual linguistic variation between the bilingual children. However, the most meaningful results come from the analysis of the syntactic structures which offer the possibility to categorize the migrant children in to competence profiles.